Abstract EN:

Each character from the comoedia palliata (a type of Roman comedy defined as an adaptation of the Greek New Comedy) corresponds to a persona, i. E. A stock-figure which could be compared to the stock-types of French classical theatre. In the first part of this thesis, I study the concept-word persona and the way Romans defined identity and the making of dramatic characters ; then a description of the comic personae of comoedia palliata is presented. Could a distinctive character be made from a persona ? I try to answer this question in the second part from different perspectives : after wondering whether each character owns a distinctive nature which could confer them individuality, I study some theatrical playing on identity (disguise, double, anagnorisis), then I focus on the way a character fits into the plot, and on the way two characters performing the same persona can actually be different from each other. These four chapters tend to prove that a character has only one identity, which is its persona, and that it is neither a fictitious individual nor the imitation of an individual. But in these chapters I also introduce an idea that provides the key to fully understand the making of character in comoedia palliata : the idea of playing. The third part offers a study of this idea of playing (ludus), or ludism, which is linked to the context of comic performance (the ludi scaenici) and to the actor's figure, playing a persona. Each character is a playing figure which plays on the stock persona it puts on stage.